


The Stone Prince

by ba_lailah



Category: Original Work
Genre: Fairy Tale Elements, Love Confessions, M/M, Magic, Men Crying, Parent/Child Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-08-31
Packaged: 2021-03-07 03:14:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26210053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ba_lailah/pseuds/ba_lailah
Summary: Prince Raian has been turned to stone, and his father grieves more deeply than anyone knows.
Relationships: King/His Enchanted Son
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13
Collections: RelationShipping 2020





	The Stone Prince

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tongue_spike](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tongue_spike/gifts).



They laid the prince to rest with great solemnity. Unlike his ancestors, he found his final resting place not in the royal crypt but in the center of the plaza before the palace. He needed no protection from the weather. He had been enchanted into stone, and the royal wizards had exhausted every effort to make him flesh again. True love's kiss was often known to cure such ailments, but the prince had neither spouse nor lover. His heart was divided between the love of adventure and the love of his kingdom, and as the one had drawn him away, the other had drawn him home. It was hard to imagine that he would never again ride forth on his gray stallion, seeking the next thrilling escapade from which the bards were sure to make a hundred songs. Now their ballads would only tell the sorrowful tale of how the Stone Prince met his fate.

King Morregant had ordered a coffin to be carved from airy white marble, a beautiful frame for the work of art that the evil wizard's spell had made of his only son. Within the coffin lay, it seemed, a statue of black granite flecked with silver glints of mica, polished until it gleamed. But no hand had carved it, and surely no artist could have so well captured the legendary beauty of Prince Raian.

Now the funeral procession was done, and the king was left to sit by his son. The guards withdrew to a respectful distance. King Morregant was a controlled, impassive man for whom emotion was a private matter, and the people, who loved him well, did not wish to embarrass him by witnessing his grief.

As the cool breeze of early evening rustled the leaves of the oak trees that Raian had loved to climb, Morregant traced the shape of his son's face. It bore an expression of pure surprise, and Morregant's only comfort was that Raian had clearly felt neither fear nor pain. 

He reached for words, but none came. His heart was too full for speech, and he feared the wind would carry his voice to the guards, so he dared not reveal even to Raian's corpse the secret he had kept for all this time. He drew his trembling fingers over his son's granite face again and again. In the light of the rising moon, the mica twinkled like stars fallen to earth.

"My son," the king choked out at last. "How I loved you—!"

Bowing his head, he allowed a single dammed-up tear—the first he had shed since he was a child—to escape his eye and fall upon the granite hand that rested on the pommel of the granite sword.

As the saltwater of sorrow trickled between Raian's fingers, they seemed to move. At first Morregant thought it a trick of the moonlight or his own exhaustion, and he rubbed his weary eyes. But when he looked again, the black of granite had given way to the mottled brown leather of Raian's worn riding glove. The prince's forefinger shifted—ever so slightly, but it did! And when Morregant lay a trembling hand atop it, he felt not the chill of stone but the warmth of life. 

Instantly he understood. Love's grief, not love's kiss, was needed to break the spell and revive the prince.

Morregant had spent a lifetime shutting away any hint of feeling. Now he commanded himself to weep, and the tears would not come. He struck his hands against the marble coffin, but pain alone could not bring tears to his eyes. He shouted wordlessly at the sky, but no sob came from his throat.

At last he leaned down until his face was nearly touching Raian's, and he whispered the deep truth that he had locked away within himself ever since his son grew to manhood: "Raian, my love for you is a love beyond love. Not only a father's love, but a lover's. If I could turn your lips to flesh again, I would kiss them a hundred times a day. My heart longs for you, my body yearns for you, my son, my son, my darling—"

He could speak no more, but it was enough. As his voice faltered, his tears overflowed, drenching the granite face and multiplying the twinkling of the mica a thousandfold. Then the gleams faded, and where there had been polished stone was the astonished, _living_ face of his son.

Raian's lips moved without sound. Morregant, realizing his son's stone breast could not yet draw breath, ran his palms down his face and then rubbed his tears over the prince's body. Stone became leather, steel, fabric, skin, and Raian's chest heaved as he drew in one breath, then another. "Father," he rasped. "Father—how—"

Morregant's tears were now of joy, and they ran down his face in rivers. He climbed into the coffin and pressed his salt-washed lips and hands to every inch of his beloved son, eagerly restoring him to life.

In the profound strangeness of being part statue and part man, Raian hardly noticed that some of his father's caresses lingered more than others. He was overwhelmed by fear and confusion. In one moment he had been cutting a path through a thick wood, and seen a strange man who raised a twisted staff and spoke dark words. In the next, he was on his back with his father's weeping face—his father, weeping! It seemed hardly more possible than the dark magic that had enchanted him—above him, and he was caught in a terrifying paralysis. But wherever his father touched him, he could move again, and so he willed himself to stay still and calm until whatever magic his father was working had brought him completely back to himself. 

At last he was cured, and he raised his shaking hands to clutch at his father, who knelt above him gazing upon him with a potent expresion of fear, relief, and love. Morregant caught him up in a tight embrace, kissing him over and over again on the cheeks and brow and once, briefly but with great fervor, on the mouth. Something passed between them in that moment, and they both shuddered with it. Their eyes met, and then they looked away. They would need to speak of that—but not now, not yet.

"How," Raian asked again, and Morregant explained it all: how his retinue had found him turned to stone by some malignant force; how they had borne him back to the castle, where the royal wizards subjected him to every counterspell they could devise, to no avail; how at last Morregant had commissioned this marble coffin, and "buried" him under the sky; how Morregant's tears had proven the key to undoing the enchantment.

"And now this coffin will make a fine birdbath, don't you think?" Morregant said, laughing through fresh tears.

Raian was overcome. He took his father's hands. "I will never leave again," he swore. "No father should ever suffer the loss of his son. No father should ever grieve as you have been grieving for me."

"Ah, my boy," Morregant said, kissing his brow. "When adventure calls to you, I'll not hold you to that promise. But until then, nothing could bring me more joy than having you here with me."

The guards, hearing someone speaking to the king, drew near and were overcome with astonishment to see the Stone Prince once more a man. They helped Morregant and Raian out of the coffin and guided them into the palace, where the revived prince was greeted with exclamations of wonder and joy. The servants fed him and bathed him, for his hunger and his horse-sweat had been restored along with his flesh. The wizards were most eager to examine him, but the king held them off. "Let the prince sleep," he said. "The stasis of enchantment can hardly be restful."

And if, that night, someone crept down the hall from the king's suite to the prince's, and knocked quietly, and was welcomed in... well, there was no one there to see such a thing, so I could not tell you for sure whether it happened at all. But it might have, it might indeed.


End file.
